Wednesday 3 September – Chief Linus comes for breakfast

The Chief wanted to have a meeting with us to try and encourage yachts to visit their village, so we invited him for breakfast. He was amazed at the boat, and kept saying how he could easily live like this! We gave him what we could rustle up for an English breakfast, eggs on toast with beans. The problem for the village is that they have so few ways to earn an income he said. It used to be Copra, coconuts that are dried out and sold for cosmetics, oils etc. However with the population increase and the lack of replanting sufficient trees, they no longer have enough coconuts to sell. So that market has collapsed. A yachhtie has tried to help him before, but things collapsed at the first hurdle, as he wanted prior notification of arrival, but doesn’t have WhatsApp and relies on text messages, which out here for the yachting community is impossible. Rowan has all sorts of ideas and plans for him! I think he could have spent all day with us, but Rowan managed to take him back after only an hour or so!

It was a frustrating day to get laundry done in between showers. In the afternoon we decided to head back to the little bay the kids had taken us to yesterday but to go there by dinghy. It was a long ride out beyond the reef, with some enormous swells, which I found quite alarming. We manoeuvred our way through the coral to the little bay hoping to go and sit on the tiny beach. But it was too wet and too many biting bugs, so we just had a swim instead. Rowan snorkelled out but the visibility wasn’t good. It was lovely to cool down though, the water was refreshingly cold. The fresh water keeps it beautifully cool.

Supper was an interesting assemble of green vegetables that the kids and Linus have traded with us. The one leaf was barely edible, confusingly it did not soften with frying like spinach, it tasted of nothing. Luckily I had plenty of anchovies, capers and olives to cheer them up. I air fried their sweet potatoes which did make them edible and actually quite nice. They were weird as they oozed a white liquid when peeled that was incredibly sticky and hard to wash off my hands. I’m being very careful washing any raw food in lots of vinegar, in the hopes of killing off any nasties. Fingers crossed it works.

One of the kids Rowan saw was covered in ring worm, Rowan asked Linus why she hadn’t got medication, and he said the hospital has none! One of his sons has an enormous wound on his foot, that really looks like it is going bad, he’s in and out the water. We gave him some Hydrogen Peroxide ointment and begged him to keep his foot out the water. Basically he doesn’t have the money to get it treated I suspect, the nearest decent hospital is too far away. Everything is a boat ride away, so doubly expensive. Really tough.